


the coffee shop at the end of the universe

by agivise



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Gen, Humor, Rivalry, boy oh boy these tags sure are gonna change a lot, good luck folks, i just really love comedy footnotes, i've planned almost none of this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-06-30 12:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15751659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agivise/pseuds/agivise
Summary: A pretentiously edgy flower shop owned by Warren Kepler and the neighbouring hipster bullshit coffee dive owned by Renée Minkowski battle it out for the notoriously coveted Town of Goddard Small Business of the Year award, presented annually by Mayor Cutter and Sheriff Pryce.It goes about as well as you'd expect.





	1. de capo

**Author's Note:**

> i write and i make dumb jokes so why not just make dumb jokes While I Write!!!  
> look i even took the time to teach myself how to make html linked footnotes so i could make even more dumb jokes and boy howdy i hope they work, i spent a solid half hour editing the ~~code~~ script,, look technically i don't think most programmers consider html to be "code" but hey look at me i'm rambling for no reason
> 
> today's song rec: fuck it i can't think of any songs so instead i'm gonna give a book rec which was, in essence, the most formative source of my humour and writing style to date. (looking back, midcentury british sci fi explains a whole lot about the way i write shit, including why i spell words with 'optional' u's, although my american keyboard sure is a fan of autocorrecting that away.) anyways the recommendation is _hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy_ series by douglas adams and if you haven't read it please do, it's so fucking wonderful and funny (and you can tell it probably influenced nearly every popular dark sci fi dramedy podcaster to date) ((and it's also where i got the title))
> 
> update: actually i don't think that linked footnotes work the same way in chaptered fics lmao i'll see what i can do but until then happy scrolling  
> update 2: YEAHHHH BABEYYYY I GOT THE LINKS TO WORK *hacker voice* IM IN

i.

The summer sun glares down so brightly that it almost gives the impression of stage lights placed with premeditated ocular malice.[1] Doug Eiffel, hands clasped around a plastic to-go cup of no-longer-iced coffee, has never before regretted wearing jeans as intensely as he does in this moment.

“Dare I give a friendly reminder to the crowd?”  Marcus Cutter speaks primly into the microphone, lips curled into the perfect mayoral smile. This is an expression which, on the average man, would make him look like a seal performing at a zoo. In this particular case, the emphasis is placed on _average_ , as on Mayor Cutter, a non-average man, the grin instead looks positively predacious. “Oh, to heck with it! You all probably know exactly what I’m about to say, but for the sake of the town meeting, there’s no harm in a little redundancy, right, folks? Warren Kepler — are you here, Warren? Oh, silly me, of course you are! Come on up here so the crowd can see you!”

Warren Kepler chooses this moment to reconsider every life choice that has lead him to this point. He also sets aside a small period of time in the near future with the sole purpose of truly appreciating and savouring every moment which is not spent trying desperately to act like a non-autogenic, non-sadomasochistic, and entirely pacifistic social benefit to Goddard, Wisconsin.

Sheriff Pryce taps her foot precisely once out of impatience, which is such a normal gesture as to not arise the slightest spook from the crowd, yet so gutturally terrifying to those who know her that Kepler leaps up onto the prop-up stage faster than a hot knife through butter (or, to those with less culinary and more sanguine a nature, a cold knife through the a particularly scrawny man’s conveniently unshielded abdomen[2]).

“Warren here, alongside his employees at SI-5 Flowers, has won the coveted Town of Goddard _Small Business of the Year_ award — and its five thousand dollar prize — for four years running. Four whole years! Tell the newcomers here a little about your shop, Warren. What’s your secret?”

“It’s a flower shop,” he drawls emotionlessly.

Two people from the crowd cheer disproportionately loudly. Conveniently enough, “two” is also the exact number of non-Kepler employees SI-5 has.

Mayor Cutter smiles in a way that looks suspiciously like a grimace from just the right angles.[3] “I was looking for more painterly a description, Warren. Tell us some more about it.”

Kepler drags his hand down his face. “We… sell… flowers.” He leans much, much too close into the mic and mumbles directly into it, “Mister Jacobi, if you can hear this, I beg that you put me out of my apparently devil-appointed goddamn misery.”

“Then beg,” Jacobi says, in a voice which has been deliberately and carefully practiced to be _just_ quiet enough that Dr. Maxwell is the sole individual in the whole world who hears this. She, as a result of this, collapses into a fit of unrestrained giggles, much to the confusion and delight of the rest of the crowd.

“Jacobi. Misery-ending. Now,” Kepler specifies, this time in a stage whisper which Mayor Cutter can very obviously hear, though he is apparently either so exasperated or so amused as to let it slide entirely.

“You wouldn’t let me bring my sword, sir!” Jacobi calls up to the stage.

“Why the _fuck_ do you own a sword, dude?” a woman named Isabel Lovelace shouts in Jacobi’s general direction.

“In case Mr. Kepler ever asks me to put him out of his misery!” he calls back in response, with the precise level of pep, condescension, and sarcasm that would usually indicate the declaration of a remarkably obvious fact.

Cutter claps his hands together in a startlingly, inhumanly loud fashion. “Well, moving right along! Up until a month or two ago, SI-5 was a shoe-in for the award, as always. They are the pride and _joy_ of our little community, after all!”

Maxwell begins cheering again. Jacobi does not. Eiffel shouts something that sounds suspiciously like the word _NEPOTISM_ up at the stage, but cleverly disguises it as a cough at the very last second.

“However, this year, we have a new contender in our midst! Renée Minkowski —”

“Can you _believe_ this guy, Lovelace?” Eiffel asks, prodding her with his elbow. “It’s _clearly_ pronounced Min- _kow_ -ski.”

Minkowski sighs so deeply that one might fear her lungs will collapse. “It’s really not, Doug. It’s really not.”

“Renée Minkowski,” Cutter pushes on through gritted teeth and, somehow, gritted eyes as well, “is the owner of a new place in town called Hephaestus Coffee. You, dear townspeople, may have heard of it — they’ve been causing quite a stir, now, haven’t they? It’s gonna be a close match this year to see who wins the grand prize. May the best business win!”

* * *

1 _Premeditated Ocular Malice_ also happens to be the name of Warren Kepler’s long-defunct funk band, which — as he mentioned approximately twice each minute from minutes three to thirty-three of one of _many_ stories told to a captive audience consisting entirely of Daniel Jacobi — actually began its life as a punk band. [return to text]  
  
2Trust him. He’s checked.[return to text]

3In this way, the expression reminds Doug rather distinctly of those plastic-ridged notebooks whose images changed when tilted back and forth — the kind which one might have owned several of throughout grade school, though interestingly enough, with absolutely no memory of having purchased them. These objects are more formally known as lenticular prints. Doug, however, has never heard the word “lenticular” once in his entire life, and instead categorizes such notebooks in his head as “holographic”, which is not even slightly what that word means.[return to text]  



	2. scherzo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaa sorry for mildly ghosting on here, i just started college and boy howdy has it been wild. this shit is so much fun but stem is Hell and i am tired.
> 
> today's song recs: the language of limbo by sevdaliza and blue by willow beats
> 
> footnote links will be added momentarily!!

ii.

Lovelace slaps her hands down on the countertop with a grin. “Look, I know I’ve only worked here for a few months —”

“Three days,” corrects Minkowski.

“— agree to disagree. But, I’d like you to know, I would consider myself to be someone with very good initiative.”

“What’s ‘initiative’?” jokes Eiffel, but Eiffel only hears this part of the conversation because he’s eavesdropping from the opposite side of the room, so the two pointedly ignore him.

“And as someone with very good initiative, I’ve invented a new drink for us to sell. And there’s not even alcohol in it or anything!”

“Should I be concerned?” drones Minkowski, taking a seat at the countertop, her hands folding in a way only the hands of clinically depressed librarians, night shift Jimmy John’s employees, and remarkably exasperated coffee shop owners do.[4]

“I call it the Espress- _no.”_

“That’s… neat, Lovelace. Very… _neat_. What’s in it, exactly?”

“See for yourself.” She slaps a travel cup down on the counter in front of Minkowski and rests her hands on her hips, a smug and overly eager expression painting her features. [5]

She glances at the cup.

She glances at Lovelace.

She glances at the cup.

“This is an empty cup,” she says simply, in that stating-the-remarkably-obvious way that people often use in situations of this nature.

Lovelace stares expectantly.

“This… is an empty cup. This is... _literally_ just an empty cup.”

“An empty cup that costs four dollars for a large,” corrects Lovelace, a proper, serious expression falling across her eyes. “We’re running a business here, dear.”

Minkowski looks as if she might protest — or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say she looks as if she _would_ consider protesting had she not already spent all her energy on keeping Doug in line. She drags her hand across her face, really wallowing in that lovely melodrama — (she quite likes to wallow, when given the opportunity) — and leans across the counter to peck her on the cheek. “Fine. Add it. But I get to pick the restaurant tonight.”

Lovelace blushes. “If you pick that weird paleo-keto-vegan pizza place again, loser, I swear to _god_ —”

Eiffel begins to choke to death on a small sip of coffee.

This event is immediately preceded by an exceptionally beautiful young woman entering the shop and smiling at him, but the only witness to her entry is Eiffel himself, who is still too busy sputtering on the floor to comment.

“Is he okay?” asks the young woman quietly. This woman’s name is Hera, spelled H-e-r-a, a piece of information which is surprisingly coveted due to Eiffel’s complete and utter inability to spell her name correctly whenever he writes it on her cup.

“He’s fine. He’s just panicking because he’s in love with you,” dismisses Lovelace

“Oh. Alright, th-then,” she says, and turns her attention to the menu.

Doug gives one last pitiful cough before dragging himself off the floor.

“Could I get a lav-lavender chai?”

“Hell yeah, dude.” Lovelace gets to work on the drink, grinning, and — with a mischievous and slightly taunting glance at Eiffel (who’s still catching his breath after his near-death experience) — turns back to Hera. “Remind me, what do you do for a living?”

“I-I’m a poet,” she says, sweeping a strand of hair back behind her ear and clutching her messenger bag just a bit closer to her body. “And a computer net-network architect and machine learning specialist. And a docent at the local observatory. And a biophysicist.” She grabs her drink as Lovelace holds it out to her, her sundress swishing slightly as she turns to leave. “Thank you so much, Isabel! And hello, Eiffel! I hope your lungs start working again soon.”

The second she’s out of eyeshot, Doug collapses back onto the floor, sobbing something along the lines of, “she’s perfect and it’s not fair, please help me, how is she so perfect,” _et cetera, et cetera._ Usual Doug stuff.

About thirty seconds later, the door opens again, and Warren Kepler and Alana Maxwell enter.

“If one more pretty person walks through that door, I’m fucking quitting,” Eiffel[6] declares.

Daniel Jacobi walks in the door.

“Alright, I quit. Goodbye cruel world.”

“No, you don’t,” says Minkowski, tossing his apron over at him. “Your shift starts in twenty minutes.”

(“He’s kinda cute,” Jacobi whispers, nudging Kepler with his elbow.

“I hate you and you’re fired,” Kepler replies, voice void of expression.

“Love you too, sir,” Jacobi replies with a wink.

Maxwell mimes gagging.)

* * *

  
4Renée Minkowski has been two of these things, and, in a bout of bad life judgement, very nearly all three.[return to text]

5Unsurprisingly, “smug and overly eager” is a set of emotions which will never, ever be experienced by a night shift Jimmy John’s employee, as “smug and overly eager night shift Jimmy John’s employee” is, by nature, an oxymoron.[return to text]

6(, who is still on the floor,)[return to text]


	3. leitmotif

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> new update!!!! yessss i love having a chance to work on this (sorry for the chapters always being so short but they take a heck of a lot longer to write and format than other stuff)
> 
> today's song recs: ain't no home by banes world and 17 by the greeting committee

iii.

The door to SI-5 Flowers gives off its usual electronic chime. It is a loud, jarring, and positively obnoxious noise. Warren Kepler grimaces at the garden shears in his hand as if he is currently having a vivid and detailed fantasy of plunging them into his own ears.

It would be a truly peculiar (and concerningly specific) assumption for any regular customer to make, but Hera, having entered the flower shop many times and, subsequently, having met Warren Kepler and Alana Maxwell roughly as often, is around three steps above the title of ‘regular customer’.

“Maxwell, wh-when you first hooked up that thing to the door, did you do it to de-deliberately piss off Kepler?”

Maxwell laughs and swings herself up onto the counter beside the cash register, brushing off her gloves in order to pick up her paper cup of Hephaestus-branded, tar-black coffee without getting dirt into it.[7] “I mean, it was also because it’s useful when we’re distracted or working in the back room, but yeah, it was probably like eighty percent your thing.”[8]

Hera weaves herself among the rows of towering plants, stopping in front of a potted orchid.

“Absolutely the fuck not, my dude,” Maxwell calls over to her. “You couldn’t keep a cactus alive. Orchids are a nightmare. They won’t last a day.”

“It’s not my fault I’m terrible at keeping things alive!”

“You’re a biophysicist,” Kepler hisses.[9] “It is _literally_ your job.”

“Biophysicist doesn’t m-mean ‘good with biology’,” she retorts, poking at a leaf and wincing as it immediately breaks off and falls to the ground.

“Yes. It. Does.”

“I f-failed botany. Plants hate me.”

“Then… why… do you keep… buying flowers from us?” he manages, before turning back to his deadheading (which is easily one of the most horrific, and consequently one of his favorite, gardening terms).

Discouraging a regular customer from continuing to be a regular customer is a generally bad idea, which Kepler is yet to discover. Despite having one of the most renowned businesses in the entire town, Warren Kepler is a horrible, _horrible_ businessman. Regardless, SI-5 Flowers is remarkably financially successful for no discernable reason. (It’s definitely not because of any sort of ‘government corruption’ or ‘mob affiliation’, because that would be ‘illegal’.)

As a result, Kepler makes Hera frown, which in itself is one of the most egregious crimes a human can commit.[10] “I… I like how they look. But I k-keep killing them, so I keep having to buy new ones.”

Maxwell, instantly wounded by the mere concept of Hera being sad, walks over and kicks Kepler very, very hard in the shin, causing him to accidentally cut a rosebush nearly in half, although he tries to play it off as if that were what he had been attempting to do the whole time.

Hera smiles a bit and this, and turns back to the towers of plants in front of her. She eventually stops in front of a set of white flowers, and gestures vaguely at the plant-ness of the plant. “How hard are these ones to kill?”

“Actually, those are pretty hardy. You might be able to keep those ones alive for a while.”

“What a-are they?”

“Some sort of Zephyranthes, I think. Rainflowers. I’d give you a long spiel about their meaning and symbolism, but that’s more Daniel’s category of bullshit.”

“Meaning? What do they mean?”

“Fuck if I know. Look it up on Wikipedia. Definitely accurate.”

Not quite grasping the joke, Hera actually does look it up on Wikipedia. “Hmm… it s-says they mean _‘I will never forget you’_. That’s — interesting, I guess. Not sure I get the rel-relevance, but I’ll get them anyways. They look nice.”

“Oh, shit, also, if you buy a potted plant today, you get a bouquet free,” Maxwell adds as she carries the small plant to the counter.

“That’s… you know that’s, like, a re-really weird sale, right? Like, finance-wise? How do you guys stay in business?”

“Don’t know, don’t care. Go on, pick out a bouquet.” She gestures to a long wall of brilliantly colored flowers, organized in rainbow order.

Hera gravitates towards the blue blossoms, taking a bundle of small, pale flowers into her hands. “I don’t really have any vases that would fit them, but — I like these. Maybe I’ll bring th-them over and see if Doug would like them for the coffee shop.”

“Forget-me-nots? Hey, would ya look at that, I actually know what those ones symbolize![11] They literally mean _‘don’t forget me’_.”

Hera pauses and stares at the flowers. “See, now this is just getting ominous.”

“I’m sure it’s not foreshadowing or referencing _any_ thing,” drawls Kepler in a _deeply_ condescending tone for absolutely no discernible reason. “Definitely not dramatic irony _at all._ ”

“Say, where _is_ Jacobi?” Hera asks, ignoring Kepler and glancing into the back room in confusion as she finishes her transaction.

“He’s on his break, so he’s chilling at Hephaestus with Doug and the gang.”

( _“Traitor,”_ Kepler utters, sounding utterly betrayed, as if he had not literally just bought a coffee from there that morning.)

Hera leaves with her rainflowers in one elbow and her forget-me-nots in the other, but before she’s fully out the door (yet _after_ the door chime has caused Kepler to begin his routine emotional breakdown), she turns back to Maxwell to ask a final question.

“So what does it stand for?”

“Hmm?”

“SI-5. The shop name. Wh-what’s it stand for?”

“What do you mean?” Maxwell asks, voice deadpan and entirely void of any hint of humor.

“It’s — it’s an acronym, right?”

“What the hell is an ‘acronym’?”

Hera opens her mouth to respond, closes it, opens it again, closes the door, opens it back up, consequently causes Kepler to fall to the floor in tears upon hearing the chime again, and then leaves without saying a word.

* * *

7The way Maxwell takes her coffee tastes remarkably like dirt anyways, but it’s the _principal_ of the thing, really.[return to text]

8Maxwell, who possesses a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a half a doctorate in information science, secretly concludes that the number is a lot closer to 46.832%. She also concludes that there’s an 85.202% chance that the average non-mathematics-and-almost-information-science-degree-holder will not appreciate the specificity of this number, so she just makes up a simpler, more exaggerated one instead.[return to text]

9He doesn’t _literally_ hiss it. That would be weird. Weird, as in weird-even-for-him weird. The way he speaks is still rather strange regardless, but at least he doesn’t hiss at people. Yet.[return to text]

10Horses, mind you, can commit even _more_ egregious crimes, but Horse Court is so far beyond human understanding that it’s pointless to even wonder what these crimes could possibly be. [return to text]

11Admittedly, it would be quite embarrassing if a literate human being _couldn’t_ guess what a flower literally named “forget-me-nots” could possibly mean. [return to text]


	4. klangfarbenmelodie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i promise i haven't abandoned this!! it just takes a hell of a lot longer than normal stuff, mostly because of the formatting tbh  
> anyways what's up folks? how are finals? i wrote this instead of studying for biology life's good don't you love this chapter title
> 
> today's song recs: pancake by jaded and fireworks by the whitest boy alive

iii.

“Eiffel?”

“Yeah, boss?”

Minkowski furrows her brows so low they look as if they might drop right off her face. “Eiffel.”

“I already responded, boss,” Eiffel says with a pout.

“What. The _fuck._ Is this?”

She points at a teeny-tiny potted plant sitting beside the register, nudging it slightly with her finger, with an expression of such concern and repulsion that one might imagine she expects it to sprout legs and kick her in the throat without a moment’s warning.

“Venus fly trap :)”

“How the _hell_ did you just say an emoticon with your human mouth?” Kepler asks with a dawning horror.

“Didn’t know you knew what an emoticon was, sir, what with you being a senior citizen and all,” Jacobi quips, dodging to the left just quickly enough to avoid Kepler flicking him in the ear, but not quickly enough to avoid Maxwell doing the very same.

“Folks, no, seriously, how did he say that out loud?” Kepler urges, glancing side to side with the resigned desperation of a man who has just thrown out his cell phone instead of his empty hamburger wrapper.[12]

“A _venus fly trap,_ Douglas?”

“Actually, Doug’s not short for Douglas, it’s short for —”

“How _dare_ you buy plants from the _enemy._ From the _enemy!_ Mutiny! _Betrayal,_ I say!”

“Hey, sick, Kepler just said the same thing about me not too long ago,” Jacobi recalls in fond reminiscence.

“You weren’t even in that scene,” Kepler points out.

“I wasn’t in that _what now?”_

“I organize my memories by choreographing all my life’s events in my head into the script of a dramatic dark comedy sci-fi stage play called _Three Hundred and Fifty-Nine Wolves._ It’s a working title,” he deadpans. “That, or I was just breaking the fourth wall again. It’s the world’s greatest mystery. No one will ever know.”

“Wait, wait, where do the wolves come in?” Doug asks, pulling out a calculator and tapping intensely at random buttons. “Three hundred and fifty-nine wolves is almost… oh my god. That’s almost four dozen —”

“Hundred,” Hera corrects quietly.

“— ah, yes, thank you, Hera — almost _hundred dozen_ wolves! Why so many wolves, guys?”

“We don’t talk about the Lichtenstein Incident,” Jacobi, Maxwell, and Kepler say in haunting unison.

“You guys sure have a lot of incidents for a small town flower shop. You’re not, like, secretly affiliated with the mafia or something, right?”

“No,” replies Jacobi with some heavily[13] exaggerated air quotes.

“Venus fly trap,” repeats Minkowski with the general ambiance of an NPC stuck on looping dialogue. _“Venus fly trap?”_

Eiffel nods. “Venus fly trap!”

_“This isn’t little shop of fucking horrors, Doug.”_

“Her name is Blessed Eternal :)”

“Guys, _please,_ he did the thing again,” Kepler whimpers.

“What thing :)”

_“Stop.”_

“:(”

With this, Kepler’s expression shifts from crushing distress to crushing _defeat._ The crushing defeat of a man who has just thrown out his cell phone instead of his empty hamburger wrapper, frustratedly put the effort into retrieving the soiled phone from the bin, and then immediately lost the phone again because he got mugged at gunpoint on the way home. [14]

“Damn, there are a lot of people in this room, huh?” Lovelace points out, glancing around. “Don’t you guys have a flower shop to run or something?”

“Wait a second,” Maxwell says with a start, turning to Jacobi. “If _I’m_ here, and _you’re_ here, and _Kepler’s_ here, then _who’s flying the plane?”_

 _“Blessie, take the wheel,”_ Doug sings with a smile, attempting to feed an entire large scone to the teeny-tiny venus fly trap. [15] _“Take it from my vines!”_

“Hey, Kepler, does your mind-show have a holiday episode?” Jacobi asks.

“Every moment spent near you is already a holiday, Mister Jacobi.”

He rolls his eyes. “Aww, is it Valentine’s Day?”

“No, Daniel, it’s National Fire Safety Awareness Week.”

Jacobi crosses his arms and grimaces. “How the hell was I supposed to know that fertilizer was flammable?”

“Probably… because _that’s_ … what _napalm_ is made of.”

“Oh, yeah.”

_“You worked on a bomb squad!”_

“Correction: I got _fired_ from a bomb squad.”

“Is that a pun?” asks Maxwell.

He smiles. “God, I really wish it was.”

* * *

12 It’s Jacobi. The man is Jacobi. He’s done it, like, three or four times — often enough that it’s starting to get a little weird, but not weird enough that anyone’s willing to bring it up in casual conversation.[return to text]

13 (and I mean _heavily)_ [return to text]

14 This one’s also Jacobi. Sorry, Jacobi.[return to text]

15 Not attempting. _Succeeding._ It eats the scone whole. Kepler almost faints.[return to text]

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! comments and kudos mean the world


End file.
